


Everybody Hurts Sometime

by alltoseek, feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Age of Sail, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 09:32:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alltoseek/pseuds/alltoseek, https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pure hurt/comfort, written for Esteven on her birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Hurts Sometime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [esteven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esteven/gifts).



 

Jack spits, trying to dislodge the strands of hair that the wind has whipped across his mouth. He is halfway along the jib-boom, his legs locked around its heel, his body almost horizontal as he reaches out to disentangle the clew of the inner jib, fouled in the sheet of the outer. A party of forecastlemen, their eyes narrowed against the driving rain, slacken the sheet a foot or two as Jack sets all his weight against the obstinate scrap of canvas. It yanks loose suddenly, and he is flung sideways by his own momentum, losing his grip on the spar. He flails as he falls, slipping through the tangle of ropes to the roiling sea; the crests of the roiling waves suck at his feet, pulling him down...

A line, there is a line just above his head; he grabs at it, and he is saved. He takes a firm hold with his other hand, then with the last of his strength he writhes his way up between the cordage and back onto the bowsprit. A slick layer of ice has coated wood and hemp alike, and tempest-flung foam cascades down his temples, down through the collar of his pea-jacket, soaking through to his very marrow. Six steps back to the forecastle, five steps, four. He cannot feel his feet, he walks on stumps alone; a wavering sensation, like floating, he thinks wonderingly, as if he is floundering already in the churning seas that wait for him under the cutwater. He knows he cannot make the leap, but he leaps nevertheless, and the waves reach up with white-flecked claws as he flings himself at the rail, and his numbed feet miss their purchase and he falls...

“Captain Aubrey? Jack?”

He wakes. He is in a cot in the sickbay, his legs twisted up in a blanket, and the wetness on his face is not sea-spume but perspiration. The Doctor appears and looms over him, reaching to touch his forehead, then his neck. Blood-slick fingers slip queasily across Jack’s pulse.

“Hush now, my dear, drink this and sleep. I shall have you moved to your own cabin when the wind abates.”

There is a shrieking coming from a figure laid out on the sea-chests, Jack becomes aware: an obscene shrieking higher and wilder than the scream of the gale. He gulps at the liquid held to his lips and closes his eyes; Stephen is already gone, bent with bloodied hands over the figure, though surely no one could survive such pain. Death comes as a friend to such men, Jack thinks, and then knows the thought to be the arrogance of a survivor. Death will come for him too, and he will fight back – will he not? He thinks he will, is sure he will, although thoughts of any kind are slippery and he can be sure of nothing in this half-waking world.

“Tcha!” It is Stephen’s voice; he is not gone after all, or perhaps Jack has slept and an age has passed. “Tcha, will you fight back? This is a question you even consider, my dear? When have you not fought back? Even against the most desperate of odds I have always known you fight back, whether mired in the mud in Chaulieu or battling eighty-foot waves and ice-mountains in the Southern Ocean. Why, in Mauritius, facing seven enemy ships against your lone _Resolution_ , the thought of giving up never crossed your mind; your words to me were ‘we have seen longer odds’ – I do believe those to be your exact words. Resolution, exactly: that is the word for you, brother. Once resolved, I have yet to see you abandon course—”

“It was not the  _Resolution_ ,” Jack mutters, provoked into opening his eyes. The shadows have moved across the bulkhead; he was right, time must have passed.

“Beg pardon?”

“We was in the  _Boadicea_ , you know, not the  _Resolution_.”

“Pah, as if the name of this ship or that, this spar or the other, as if these particular nautical terms you sailors cling to so tightly matter so much,” Stephen says, waving off the difference between a 38-gun frigate and a 74-gun ship-of-the-line as inconsequential. “You cling as tightly to life as ever you do to any detail of your precious ships – and how you clung! In a sail-less boat in the Atlantic after _La Fleche_ burnt,” —here Stephen looks sharply at Jack, who stays meekly silent— “After _La Fleche_ burnt, as I say, in a boat lacking such rudimentary necessities as food, water, and even sails; and even utterly adrift in the Pacific, without support nor spar of any kind, yet you clung. And how thankful I was, and am, that you did so, Jack; for without you I cannot tell what would have become of me, then or at any time. Take my hand, my dear.”

Jack frowns and reaches out tentatively.

“No, no, with your good hand, now, Jack, of course.” Stephen places his own hand near Jack's and the captain grasps it. “Aye, that is the grip I have felt so often, guiding my own hands and feet up the ropes with the foolish unnecessary perseverance of a nurse whose charge has long outgrown her care. I am become a nautical creature entirely, a being of sea and waves and wind; I climb the rigging nimbly as any ape—”

Here Jack cannot stop his lips from twitching.

“You have something to say, brother?” asks Stephen severely.

“No, no, dear soul. Pray do continue, please.”

“As nimbly, I say,” Stephen continues with emphasis, “as any ape brought to sea, and yet you persist in clinging tightly to me should I ever venture into the top. And you think you may release this grip you have on your own life? As easily as you might release me, I suppose. Do you think you should abandon us so freely, in abandoning your fight against the eternal quietus? That we should allow you so simply to leave us? That I should as readily depart from you?”

Jack tightens his hold upon Stephen's hand.

“Of course I would not, nor more than you, my dear,” Stephen tells him. “This grip you have—you restrict the circulation, joy, please to lighten your grasp; my fingers grow somewhat numb. Ah, much better, I thank you—this grip you have is as strong as ever, and with the blessing the same strength shall return to your injured arm. Then no longer will you feel so low, but climb high, to the highest pinnacle of this ship, the very apex itself; and this time you will not fall, but gaze in joyful victory again upon the sea that you love so well. The sea, the boundless wine-dark main...”

Stephen’s voice, so insistent at first, grows soft, lulling, as he murmurs to Jack of the ocean and its wonders; and even as Jack struggles to nod and smile and hold his grip he falls into sleep.

He sleeps. Sleeps: and when he wakes he is alone and the world is calmer, the cross-seas gone. The _Surprise_ is rising and falling like a cradle under a mother’s hand as rollers sweep under her stern in unbroken lines, and the cot in which Jack lies is rising and falling with the same steady rhythm. He wants nothing more than to rest, but it is not to be thought of. He is uninjured, as far as he can tell, and his ship is uninjured, but for a few minor spars. The foretopmast was one such, he recalls; it went by the board early in the blow, and his boatswain is a born fool who will try to sway up the mainmast of a 74 in its place, if no one is there to stop him.

Jack struggles out of the cot and into his sodden coat, slips past the Marine sentry and climbs the companionway. On the deserted quarterdeck he peers up: the mizzen topgallantmast, too, is sprung just above the cap. He opens his mouth to call for hands, but all are swarming around the crippled foremast, no crew to spare for the mizzen. Clenching his teeth, he sets foot on the ratlines and clambers slowly up the shrouds to inspect the damage. The wind, as if sensing its enemy, is beginning to rise again; it buffets at him fitfully, trying to pluck him from his hold. Higher, higher. The mizzen topgallantsail yard is bending under the strain of the rising gale, bending, creaking: it cannot survive such a force, it must break. There is a gasket undone on the topgallantsail, snapping back and forth across the loosened canvas, allowing the wind to catch at the fabric. Jack swarms across to secure it, but under the immense pressure of the tempest it pulls at his arm, and now it is his arm that is bending, bending under the intolerable inhuman strain, and he knows that it must break, or else he must let go, let go and fall...

He wakes up. He is in his own cot this time, the telltale compass above him showing the ship’s steady eastward course across a slow swell, and Stephen is shoving at him.

“Belay that squawking and roll over, can you not, Jack? It is no wonder you sleep uneasily when your fractured arm is crushed beneath your bulk. Obesity is no friend to the wounded.”

Jack shifts and releases his arm into the Doctor’s care. It aches, but the screaming pain has abated. “Stephen,” he says carefully, and finds it does not hurt to speak. “Stephen, I thought I should let go.”

“Did you, indeed, my dear? Bonden tells me you slipped and fell from some spar or other, that anyone might have slipped in such conditions. Let me see your shoulder, now, and hold still whilst I tie off the bandage. A little bruising, contusions across the...”

Jack seldom listens when the Doctor proses on about anatomy or philosophy. He lets the meaningless comforting words wash over him now. “I fell, yes,” he interrupts after a minute or two, “and I landed on my damned shoulder, but then in my dreams I thought I might fall again, and I thought I should let go, though you told me I should not. The strangest dreams, they were.” _I thought I should let go, and I thought I should like to_ , he thinks, but cannot find words that do not sound self-pitying.

 “I dosed you with laudanum before M‘Alister and I reduced the anterior dislocation. Not the easiest of operations on a man your size, if he resists as you did,” Stephen mutters, hauling Jack’s torso upright with one hand and swinging Jack’s feet down with the other, with the unnerving impersonal practised ease of the physician. “It is said that the poppy can disturb the dreams of those unaccustomed to it. As to your particular nightmares, pay them no heed; you were never one to let go.”

“Well, no. No, of course not. What would you do without me to patch up, eh, old Stephen? You would be sadly idle. Bored, I dare say, ha ha!” The spectre of death is already receding, fading into memory; it never troubles Jack for long. He will meet it without fear when it comes, he thinks, whether friend or foe.

“I should be reduced to ‘patching up’ a mere seventeen other patients,” Stephen says waspishly. “Hold up, Jack, you are not quite fit to stand, I find.” He sits next to Jack on the cot, his arm round Jack’s shoulder, propping him steady whilst he peers into Jack’s left eye, then his right.

“I am perfectly well, just a little tired from your infernal opium draughts. Does the foremast—”

“Foremast be damned. All is well. Tom Pullings particularly tasked me to tell you, all is well, and you must sleep. Sleep, now, honey.”

“Will you—”

“I will wait.”

Jack is lowered again a little at a time to his pillow, his very soft pillow. His cot swings in its accustomed path, lulling him with its tale of gentle breezes. A hand touches his forehead and strokes his hair very gently. He closes his eyes.

He need not fight sleep. The dreams waiting for him are no nightmares, and when he wakes, Stephen will be there.

 

 

 


End file.
